Lotus Guru

I was approached this week at my current client by the "Sharepoint Developer" who had been asked by a senior manager to find out what it would take to build a planned workflow application in Notes. In this case he had already established how to do this in Sharepoint, but no one on that team had any Notes experience. After our conversation I think we were both surprised to learn that the other product was "good at workflow".

I learned that Sharepoint has a configurable (and wizard driven) workflow setup capability built into Sharepoint Designer, while Notes requires either Lotus Workflow (which I don't believe is cheap), a third-party or open-source add-on, or a "roll your own" approach. Only because I happen to have put together a prototype workflow application based on OpenNTF's Qenos workflow framework (VERY cool btw) was I able to demonstrate something that might compare to Sharepoint's "out of the box" capabilities.

So the question I have is this: If "workflow" is what Notes is so good at, why has IBM not included a "workflow.ntf" in the default shipped product? Seems pretty clear to me that Sharepoint is exploiting this glaring oversight, and its time IBM stepped up and either bought out a business partner, redid Lotus Workflow, or put resources behind making the Qenos Open Source workflow tool "out of the box ready" (resources already go toward Linux, so this is not a big stretch). Other business partners with workflow tools will have to adapt by making their products that much better, or shift gears altogether.

• Plugging glaring holes in Notes' out-of-the-box capabilities can only improve its competitive position vis a vis Sharepoint et. al.
• Not giving inexperienced developers already inside companies what they need to easily build good applications with Notes is a big reason that many of those applications suck, and that is a big reason so many companies have abandoned Notes as a platform (my SuperNTF template is a more general solution targetted at this problem).
• More companies using Notes for real applications (using said out of the box capabiity) means more companies recognize Notes as a good application platform.
• Greater demand for custom Notes applications can only help (all) business partners selling products and services.
• Many partners with workflow solutions have OTHER solutions to sell also, so losses on the workflow front will likely be mitigated by gains in other markets.
• Many partners have workflow solutions that are likely "better" in some ways than anything IBM is likely to ship, so those companies using workflow.ntf will look at partner solutions when they want to take their apps to a higher level.